This week at Retraction Watch featured the debut of our new editor, and a unicorn. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Where should you submit your next paper? Here’s a study designed to help you make that decision.
- Should the NIH have an “emeritus” award?
- “A scientist should have the right to trash-talk her opponents,” says Dan Engber at Slate.
- “Federal research dollars are needlessly wasted as scientists spend more and more of their time trying to recoup operational costs,” says Vivane Callier.
- The U.S. measles outbreak has prompted a number of looks back at anti-vaccine movement. Here are two takes from BuzzFeed’s Virginia Hughes and Gizmodo’s Matt Novak.
- “Science is under siege, but hiding inside the Ivory Tower is not the answer.”
- What’s the likely future of PeerJ? Phil Davis takes a look.
- The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s business school submitted false data for rankings, a report found.
- Scientific publishing, circa 1665.
- Is your science unfit for print?
- “R.-L. Etienne has chosen to invest his prodigious talents in the dual literary métiers of (a) ‘Solicitation of Submissions to Guest-Edited Volumes’, and (b) ‘Unpublication’.” A reader takes a look at the work of an author who has had 13 papers retracted.
- In Melbourne? Come see Ivan speak there on February 10.
- “The biggest problem with reproducibility is not an issue of malfeasance; those are a tiny, tiny fraction of the cases,” says the co-founder of a virtual lab-as-a-service business. “The biggest issue is that it’s a communication problem.”
- Canada’s Postmedia has laid off one of that country’s best science reporters, Margaret Munro, who regularly reported on misconduct.
- A Huffington Post editor’s note: “This blog previously contained quotation marks around the six million figure on Holocaust deaths. The author did not mean to cast doubt over the figure, it was meant as a quotation. We apologise for any offence this caused.”
- How a listener’s complaint improved NPR’s reporting.
- Publishing ethics, court style.
- We “clearly got it wrong:” Medical board pumps brakes on controversial parts of certification program.
- A publisher has ended its lawsuit against a librarian who was critical of its offerings.
- UK regulators are warning people who took GcMAF, being sold without approval for various diseases, that there were a number of problems at a lab producing the product. Three studies of GcMAF have been retracted.
- A retraction and apology from NBC’s Brian Williams.
- Jeffrey Beall highlights a “very weak attempt at starting a humanities journal.”
If I hadn’t gone to graduate school, I would have gone into industry instead. And as an industry scientist my job is to contribute to the productivity of the company, and make profit for the company, which then redistributes it to the shareholders.
By going into graduate school and perhaps into academia, my new masters are not corporate, but universities. Universities are only interested in the indirects that they can skim off of each grant you write. If your research is intriguing enough to bring in benefactors/philanthropy that is a bonus…more money for the university, which might give some back to you in the form of a named/funded professorship.
As for the wasted monies going into a “research bureaucracy”, then that is on the University. No institution goes out of its way to create efficiency, they only do so when forced into doing so. Dialing back the indirects would be a powerful way of doing so, and will result in universities recruiting less faculty…only enough faculty to staff the buildings that their infrastructure grants will fund.
The PhD bubble is finally bursting. And the post-doc/second-post-doc bubbles are still growing.
UK regulators are warning people who took GcMAF, being sold without approval for various diseases, that there were a number of problems at a lab producing the product.
A friend sent me another link to the story, from a local source:
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridgeshire-laboratory-raided-unlicensed/story-25981305-detail/story.html
You know it’s local because the final sentence uses the nearest pub as a landmark to explain the location of the laboratory:
The GcMAF company’s founder also claims that
(I am not drinking any of his homebrew until I find out what really happened to all that not-for-human-consumption plasma product);
and
— which may have been unintentionally honest about the origins of the literature that supports GcMAF.
The product has been repeatedly tested, including at Government laboratories and at the University of Florence, Mr Noakes said, adding the company had written 31 research papers on GcMAF and appeared in respected science journals.
Is it allowed, in terms of copyright restrictions, to be adding copyrighted papers published in Elsevier, Springer and other STM journals, on ResearchGate? For example:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266957599_Photosynthetic_inhibition_under_salinity_challenged_environment_An_insight_into_regulation_of_rubisco
If yes, can someone please explain the logic in detail.